Entries Tagged as 'Gamer’s Bookshelf'

I married above my station to someone smarter and more organized than I am. Her book, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885-1945, is now available at Amazon. I don’t expect any of you to buy it, but it’s worth an announcement anyway because I saw how hard this was for her to write […]

It’s been 30 years since the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God was broadcast on Public Television’s Masterpiece Theatre. The series remains well-loved and stands as one of the great mini-series in a time when everyone on broadcast television was doing mini-series. The format seems to have been […]

As every game journalist knows, nothing gets eyeballs like a list. Ten most important this. Fifteen least appreciated that. Fifty sexiest. Hundred scariest. So it’s sort of right and proper to pay homage to one of the first big “list” books, the one that earned its otherwise negligible author eternal fame. Sir Edward Creasy was […]

I don’t read a lot of fiction. And I read even less fantasy literature, Tolkien excepted. But I thought that some good fantasy reading would make a nice Christmas gift for my geeky wife and everyone I asked – everyone – recommended the same series: George R. R. Martin’s still-in-progress Song of Ice and Fire. […]

Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel sets out to answer a single question and finds a single answer. Q: Why did the European powers have such an historical advantage over the world they dominated? A: Geography. Sure, the book is more complicated than this, but not much. The east-west movement of crops […]

You can probably make a strong case that modern historical research was born in nineteenth century Germany. Certainly modern classical history was. In a world where most historians were content to simply repeat whatever the earliest or most notable sources were, Germany was producing scholars committed not simply to working out the contradictions between sources, […]